My Year 2018 on Spotify

A couple of days ago I got a really cool email from Spotify. Basically they tallied up my total listeners and streams for the year, and also sent me some interesting facts. I was pretty blown away.

One of the most amazing stats was that people streamed my music on Spotify for a total of 62,000 minutes this year. Wow. That's more than a thousand hours that people were willing to spend with my music. That is super gratifying.

2018 was a great year for me on Spotify overall. My total fans grew (to over 1800), as did my followers (to 69). And this happened without any promotion on my part, and no new music (for the past 10 years!). Basically a few people heard and liked my music and included it on their playlists. A few of their listeners liked it, and included it on their playlists. And so on. By the logic and power of Spotify, my music made its own way to hundreds of people whom I never otherwise would have connected with. That is just so cool.

I have high hopes for 2019 too. I'm planning to release new music for the first time in a decade, and I'm really excited about the songs, about my new collaborators, and about the whole idea of getting back in the game. I need to spend some time setting achievable but ambitious goals for next year, but I think increasing my presence and fanbase on Spotify will likely be central to my strategy for 2019.

The other number that kind of blew me away from Spotify for 2018 was that my music was heard in 419 cities in 46 countries throughout the world. Ten or twenty years ago, that was completely unthinkable for a small independent musician like me. The internet is really changing the way we listen to and share music. That change isn't all roses, I accept that, but it does come with a lot of upside, which we should not overlook or undervalue either.